Funny kind of love in Spielberg's AI

THIS SPIELBERG-DIRECTED science fiction story is set in a future, where ‘artificial intelligence's' co-exist with their human creators in a world that has seen global warming take effect. The polar ice caps have melted and many of the world's major cities are underwater.

Robots are programmed to carry out a variety of individual tasks and are anthropomorphic, yet distinguishable from the real thing. Possessing the ability to mimic human behaviour, they nonetheless feel no emotion.

Genius scientist Professor Hobby's (William Hurt) desire to build a robot boy designed to love and be loved is realised in the form of David (Haley Joel Osment) who is given to "test" parents Monica and Henry, currently grieving over their dying son.

They awaken in him a desire to gain his mother's love and he embarks on a physical and emotional journey towards becoming a real boy in order to validate his ‘mother's' love for him.

Taking on the project of the late Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg has successfully combined Kubrick's vision with his own Hollywood-friendly style to create something of a masterpiece.

AI is distinctively Spielberg with its Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. references and influences, but there are also touches that owe themselves exclusively to Kubrick's authorship.

An early set design is an update from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the film's dark tone is certainly more Kubrick than Spielberg.

Spielberg's mastery of special effects creates, perhaps, his most accomplished work to date. In an early scene, a robot seamlessly transforms from humanoid girl into faceless mechanism and back again. Later, robots walk around in half-humanoid, half-mechanoid forms.

The story's preoccupation with the nature of love poses, many questions. David's is an obsessive love that I find almost psychotic. But is his synthetic, pre-programmed love any less real than human love?

Despite being criticized for being overly sentimental and manipulative, AI's dark tone, heightened emotion and eerie prophetic vision of the future actually lend an unsettling ambience to the film that truly disturbs.